Military history of the Soviet Union - Definition and Overview

The military history of the Soviet Union began in the early days following the 1917 October Revolution and the creation of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, which joined with other former provinces of the Russian Empire to become the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1922. In the 1940s the Soviet Union took part in World War II, successfully defeating Nazi Germany and becoming an occupying force in many countries of the Eastern bloc.

Following the war, the Soviet Union became one of two superpowers, rivaling the United States. The Cold War between the two nations led to Soviet military buildups, the arms race, and the Space Race. By the early 1980s, the Soviet armed forces were the world's largest by every measure—in number of weapons, in manpower, and in size of their military-industrial base. In the end, the Soviet Union fell in 1991 due to economic and political factors rather than due to military defeat (see history of the Soviet Union (1985-1991)).

The Soviet military consisted of five armed services, a rare deviation from the standard army, navy, and air force divisions of most nations. In their official order of importance, the Soviet armed services were the Strategic Rocket Forces, Ground Forces, Air Forces, Air Defense Forces, and Naval Forces. The two other Soviet militarized forces were the Internal Troops (MVD Troops), subordinated to the Ministry of the Interior, and the Border Troops, subordinated to the KGB.

Tsarist and revolutionary background

At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Tsarist army, exhausted by its disastrous participation in the First World War, was in the final stages of disintegration and collapse. Even though the Bolshevik influence in the ranks was strong, the army still contained many opponents of the Bolsheviks, especially among the officer corps. Thus the Bolsheviks, who perceived the Tsarist army as one of the foundations of the hated old regime, decided to abolish it and create in its place a new military. They recognized the importance of building an army under their control; without a loyal army, the Bolshevik organization itself would have been unable to hold the power it had seized.

Members of the Red Army gather around Lenin and Trotsky in Petrograd.

Immediately after coming to power, the Bolsheviks merged their 20,000-man army, the Red Guards, with 200,000 Baltic Fleet sailors and Petrograd garrison soldiers who supported the Bolsheviks. Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin decreed the establishment of the Red Army on January 28, 1918. Leon Trotsky was declared first commissar for war.

The early Red Army was egalitarian but poorly disciplined. The Bolsheviks considered military ranks and saluting to be bourgeois customs and abolished them. Soldiers elected their own leaders and voted on which orders to follow. This arrangement was abolished, however, under pressure of the Russian Civil War (1918-1921), and ranks were reinstated.

During the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks fought counterrevolutionary groups that became known as the White armies as well as several of Russia's former allies such as the United States, Britain and France, which invaded the Soviet Union in an attempt to overthrow the Bolshevik government. It also fought wars with countries and national groups which attempted to gain their independence following the collapse of the Russian Empire, most notably Poland in the Polish-Soviet War.

Because most professional officers had joined the White armies, the Soviets initially faced a shortage of experienced military leaders. To remedy this, the Bolsheviks recruited 50,000 former Imperial Army officers to command the Red Army. At the same time, they attached political commissars to Red Army units to monitor the actions of professional commanders and their allegiance to the Russian Communist Party. By 1921 the Red Army had defeated four White armies and held off five armed, foreign contingents that had intervened in the civil war, but suffered defeat in the Polish-Soviet War, which ended with the Treaty of Riga in April 1921.

After the civil war, the Red Army became an increasingly professional military organization. With most of its 5 million soldiers demobilized, the Red Army was transformed into a small regular force, and territorial militias were created for wartime mobilization. Soviet military schools, established during the civil war, began to graduate large numbers of trained officers loyal to the party. In an effort to increase the prestige of the military profession, the party downgraded political commissars, established the principle of one-man command, and reestablished formal military ranks.

Development of the structure, ideology, and doctrine of the Soviet military

Party control

The Communist Party had a number of mechanisms of control over the country's armed forces. First, starting from a certain rank, only a Party member could be a military commander, and was thus subject to Party discipline. Second, the top military leaders had been systematically integrated into the highest echelons of the party. Third, the party placed a network of political officers throughout the armed forces to influence the activities of the military.

A deputy political commander (zampolit) served as a political commissar of the armed forces. A zampolit supervised party organizations and conducted party political work within a military unit. He lectured troops on Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet view of international affairs, and the party's tasks for the armed forces. Following World War II the zampolit lost all command authority but retained the power to report to the next highest political officer or organization on the political attitudes and performance of the unit's commander.

In 1989 over 20 percent of all armed forces personnel were party members or Komsomol members. Over 90 percent of all officers in the armed forces were party or Komsomol members.

Military counterintelligence

Main article : Military counterintelligence of Soviet Army

Throughout the history of the Soviet Army, the Soviet secret police (Cheka, GPU, NKVD, ...) maintained control over the counterintelligence Special Departments (Особый отдел) that existed at all larger military formations. The best known was SMERSH (1943-1946) created during the Great Patriotic War.

While the staff of a Special Department of a regiment was generally known, it controlled a network of secret informants, both chekists and recruited ordinary military.

Military-party relations

During the 1930s, Joseph Stalin's five-year plans and industrialization drive built the productive base necessary to modernize the Red Army. As the likelihood of war in Europe increased later in the decade, the Soviet Union tripled its military expenditures and doubled the size of its regular forces to match the power of its potential enemies.

In 1937, however, Stalin purged the Red Army of its best military leaders. Fearing that the military posed a threat to his rule, Stalin jailed or executed an estimated thousands of Red Army officers, including three of five marshals. These actions were to severely impair the Red Army's capabilities in the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-1940 and in the Second World War.

Fearing the immense popularity of the armed forces after World War II, Stalin demoted war hero Marshal Georgy Zhukov and took personal credit for having saved the country. After Stalin's death in 1953, Zhukov reemerged as a strong supporter of Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev rewarded Zhukov by making him minister of defense and a full Politburo member. Concern that the Soviet army might become too powerful in politics, however, led to Zhukov's abrupt dismissal in the fall of 1957. Khrushchev later alienated the armed forces by cutting defense expenditures on conventional forces in order to carry out his plans for economic reform.

Leonid Brezhnev's years in power marked the height of party-military cooperation as he provided ample resources to the armed forces. In 1973 the minister of defense again became a full Politburo member for the first time since 1957. Yet Brezhnev evidently felt threatened by the professional military, and he sought to create an aura of military leadership around himself in an effort to establish his authority over the armed forces.

In the early 1980s, party-military relations became strained over the issue of resource allocations to the armed forces. Despite a downturn in economic growth, the armed forces argued, often to no avail, for more resources to develop advanced conventional weapons.

Gorbachev downgraded the role of the military in state ceremonies, including moving military representatives to the end of the leadership line-up atop Lenin's Mausoleum during the annual Red Square military parade commemorating the October Revolution. Instead, Gorbachev emphasized civilian economic priorities and reasonable sufficiency in defense over the professional military's perceived requirements.

Doctrine

The Russian army was defeated in the First World War, a fact which strongly shaped the early strages of Red Army development. While the armies of Britain and France were content to retain strategies which had made them victorious, the Red Army proceeded to experiment and develop revolutionary new tactics and concepts, developing parallel to the reborn German armed forces. The Soviets found themselves a nation unique to human history and thus felt no loyalty to previous military tradition, an ideology which allowed for and prioritized innovation.

From its conception the Red Army committed itself to emphasizing highly mobile warfare. This decision was influenced by the formative wars of its history, namely the Russian Civil War and the Polish-Soviet War. Both of these conflicts had little in common with the static trench warfare of the First World War. Instead, they featured long range mobile operations, often by small but highly motivated forces, as well as rapid advances of hundreds of kilometers in a matter of days.

Under Lenin's New Economic Policy the Soviet Union had few resources to devote to the Red Army during its formative years in the 1920s. This changed only when Stalin began the industrialization drive in 1929, a policy created in part to allow for unprecedented funds to be dedicated to the military.

Using these new resources the Red Army of the 1930s managed to develop a highly sophisticated concept of mobile warfare which relied on huge formations of tanks, aircraft, and airborne troops designed to break through the enemy's line and carry the battle deep to the enemy's rear. Soviet industry responded, supplying tanks, aircraft and other equipment in sufficient numbers to make such operations practical.

Soviets did not follow the Germans in assuming that the next war would be a "blitzkrieg" fought largely with equipment produced before the start of the war. Instead, they developed their armament factories under the assumption that during the war they would have to rebuild the whole equipment of the ground and air forces many times over. This assumption was indeed proven correct during the titanic struggle with Germany between the years 1941 and 1945.

Tragically, this doctrinal achievement of the Red Army in the early 1930s was gravely disrupted by Stalin's purge of the military's leadership. Since the new doctrines were associated with officers who had been declared enemies of the state, the support for them declined. Many large mechanised formations were disbanded, with the tanks distributed to support the infantry. After the German blitzkrieg proved its potency in Poland and France, the Red Army started a frantic effort to rebuild the large mechanised corps, but the task was only partly finished when the Wehrmacht attacked in 1941. The huge tank forces, powerful only on paper, were mostly annihilated by the Germans in the first months of Operation Barbarossa.

Another factor contributing to the initial defeat was that the Soviet rearmament effort was started too early, and hence in 1941 the majority of Soviet equipment was obsolete and inferior to that of the Wehrmacht. Overall, the disastrous defeats suffered by the Red Army at the start of the war with Germany have tended to obscure the earlier doctrinal achievements. Nevertheless, these revolutionary doctrines were eventually successfully used at the front starting in 1943, once the Red Army regained the initiative.

Practical deployment of the Soviet military

Interwar era

Following the death of Lenin, the Soviet Union was enmeshed in a struggle for succession that pitted Trotsky and his policy of "world revolution" against Stalin and his policy of "socialism in one country." Stalin prevailed and Trotsky was removed as war commisar in 1925 resulting in a turn away from the policy of spreading the revoloution abroad in favour of focussing on domestic issues and defending the country against the possibility of foreign invasion.

World War II

Main article : Eastern Front (WWII)

Marking the Soviet Union's victory, a soldier raises the Soviet flag over the German Reichstag in the Nazi capital of Berlin

The Red Army had little time to correct its numerous deficiencies before Nazi Germany swept across the Soviet border on June 22, 1941 in the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa. The Soviets were thoroughly unprepared for a war with Germany, having signed a non-agression pact (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) with the Nazis in 1939... a truce that Stalin assumed had pacified Hitler and avoided any possibility of a Nazi-Soviet conflict. During the initial stages of the war the Soviet military was forced to retreat, trading territory for time while suffering a staggering number of casualties.

Eventually the Soviets managed to slow the Wehrmacht's blitzkrieg, halting the Nazi offensive in December 1941 outside the gates of Moscow. The Red Army then launched a powerful winter counteroffensive which pushed the enemy away from the capital. At the start of 1942, the weakened Axis armies surrendered their march on Moscow and advanced south towards the Caucasus and Volga river. This offensive in turn ran out of steam in the fall of 1942, allowing the Soviet forces to stage a devasting counteroffensive on the overextended enemy. The Red Army encircled and destroyed significant German forces at the Battle of Stalingrad, which ended in February 1943 and reversed the tide of the entire war. In the summer of 1943, the Red Army seized the strategic initiative, liberating all Soviet territory from German occupation in 1944. After having driven the German army out of Eastern Europe, in May 1945 the Red Army launched the final assault on Berlin that effectively ended the Second World War in Europe. Once Germany was defeated, the Red Army joined the war against Japan, and in the summer of 1945 carried out a brilliant offensive which destroyed the Japanese forces in northern China (Manchuria). The Red Army emerged from the war as the most powerful land army in history and became known as the Soviet Army thereafter.

The defeat of the Wehrmacht had come, however, at the cost of 7 million military dead and perhaps 27 million dead among the total Soviet population, by far the highest losses of an any country during the war. This is believed to be one of the highest human death tolls from any military conflict.[1] (http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm#Second)

The Cold War and conventional forces

See also: Cold War

By the end of Second World War the Soviet Union had a standing army of 10-13 million men. Immediately following Germany's surrender this number was reduced to 5 million.

In the postwar period, the Soviet Union converted its military occupation of the countries of Eastern Europe into political and economic influence over Eastern Europe. Mindful of the numerous invasions of Russia and the Soviet Union from the West throughout history, Stalin sought to create a buffer zone between Germany and the Soviet Union made up of friendly Eastern European countries, most of which the Red Army had occupied in the course of the war. (Russia had suffered three devastating Western onslaughts in the previous 150 years: Napoleon's invasion of Russia, the First World War, and the Second World War.) Taking advantage of its military occupation of these countries, the Soviet Union actively assisted local communist parties in coming to power. By 1948 seven East European countries had communist governments.

In this setting, the Cold War emerged out of a conflict between Stalin and U.S. President Harry Truman over the future of Eastern Europe during the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945. An aggressive Truman charged that Stalin had betrayed the Yalta agreement. With Eastern Europe under Red Army occupation, the Soviet Union remained adamant in the face of Truman's attempt to use the U.S. atomic monopoly to coerce the Soviets into making concessions.

Conventional military power showed its continued influence after the liberation of Eastern Europe, when the Soviet Union used its troops to invade Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 to keep these countries within the Soviet alliance system. The Soviet Union and the western forces, led by the US, faced a number of standoffs that threatened to turn into live conflicts such as the Berlin Blockade of 1948 - 1949 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 which saw "hawks" on both sides push the respective rivals closer towards war due to policies of brinksmanship. This attitude which was tempered by fears of a nuclear conflict and desires among moderates for détente.

In the 1970s, the Soviet Union began to modernize its conventional warfare and power projection capabilities. At the same time, it became more involved in regional conflicts or local wars than ever before. The Soviet Union supplied arms and sent military advisers to a variety of Third World allies in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Soviet troops, however, saw little combat action until the invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. They fought a counterinsurgency against the Afghan rebels. An estimated 15,000 Soviet soldiers had been killed and 35,000 wounded in the conflict by the time Soviet forces began to withdraw from Afghanistan in May 1988.

The Cold War and nuclear weapons

Main article: Nuclear weapons and the Cold War

From the late 1940s, the Soviet armed forces focused on adapting to the Cold War in the era of nuclear arms by achieving parity with the United States in strategic nuclear weapons.

The Soviet Union proposed various nuclear disarmament plans since the development of nuclear weapons during World War II. The Cold War did not permit the Soviet Union to seriously contemplate nuclear disarmament or arms reductions while it was in the process of developing and deploying nuclear weapons in the 1940s, 1950s, and most of the 1960s. During the early to mid-1960s, however, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to ban nuclear and other weapons from Antarctica and nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere, outer space, and underwater.

By the late 1960s, the Soviet Union had reached a rough parity with the United States in some categories of strategic weaponry and at that time offered to negotiate limits on strategic nuclear weapons deployments. The Soviet Union wished to constrain U.S. deployment of an antiballistic missile (ABM) system and retain the ability to place multiple independently-targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs).

The Soviet-American Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) began in November 1969 in Helsinki. The interim agreement signed in Moscow in May 1972 froze existing levels of deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and regulated the growth of submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). As part of the SALT process, the ABM Treaty was also signed.

The SALT agreements were generally considered in the West as having codified the concept of Mutually assured destruction (MAD), or deterrence. Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union recognized their mutual vulnerability to massive destruction, no matter which state launched nuclear weapons first. A second SALT agreement, SALT II, was signed in June 1979 in Vienna. Among other provisions, it placed an aggregate ceiling on ICBM and SLBM launchers. The second SALT agreement was never ratified by the United States Senate, however, in large part because of the breakdown of détente in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

At one time, the Soviet Union maintained the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. According to estimates by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the peak of approximately 45,000[2] (http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/Russia/) was reached in 1986. Roughly 20,000 of these were believed to be tactical nuclear weapons, reflecting the Red Army doctrine that favored the use of these weapons if war came in Europe. The remainder (approximately 25,000) were strategic, Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). These weapons were considered both offensive and defensive in nature.

Upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union, most of the nuclear wapons were inherited by Russia, with the others inherited by the Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Amid fears of nuclear proliferation, these were all certified as transfered to Russia by 1996. Uzbekistan is another former Soviet Republic where nuclear weapons may once have been stationed, but they a now signators on the Nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

Military-industrial complex and the economy

With the notable exceptions of Khrushchev and possibly Gorbachev, Soviet leaders since the late 1920s have emphasized military production over investment in the civilian economy. The high priority given to military production has traditionally enabled military-industrial enterprises to commandeer the best managers, labor, and materials from civilian plants. As a result, the Soviet Union has produced some of the world's most advanced armaments. In the late 1980s, however, Gorbachev transferred some leading defense industry officials to the civilian sector of the economy in an effort to make it as efficient as its military counterpart.

The integration of the party, government, and military in the Soviet Union was most evident in the area of defense-related industrial production.Gosplan, the state planning committee, had an important role in directing necessary supplies and resources to military industries. The Defense Council made decisions on the development and production of major weapons systems. The Defense Industry Department of the Central Committee supervised all military industries as the executive agent of the Defense Council. Within the government, the deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers headed the Military Industrial Commission. The Military Industrial Commission coordinated the activities of many industrial ministries, state committees, research and development organizations, and factories and enterprises that designed and produced arms and equipment for the armed forces.

In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union devoted a quarter of its gross economic output to the defense sector (at the time most Western analysts believed that this figure was 15 percent). ¹ At the time, the military-industrial complex employed at least one of every five adults in the Soviet Union. In some regions of Russia, at least half of the workforce was employed in defense plants. (The comparable U.S. figures were roughly one-sixteenth of gross national product and about one of every sixteen in the workforce.) In 1989, one fourth of the entire Soviet population in 1989 was engaged in military activities, whether active duty, military production, or civilian military training.

Collapse of the Soviet Union and the military

The political and economic chaos in the early 1990s soon erupted into the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and collapse of the Soviet Union. The political chaos and rapid economic liberalization in Russia had an enormously negative impact on the funding of the military.

As the USSR moved towards disintegration in 1991, the huge Soviet military played a surprisingly feeble and ineffective role in propping up the dying Soviet system. After 1988 the military got involved in trying to suppress conflicts and unrest in the Caucasus but proved incapable of restoring peace and order. On January 13 1991 Soviet forces stormed the State Radio and Television Building and the TV retranslation tower in Vilnius, both under opposition control, killing 14 people and injuring 700. This action was perceived by many as heavy-handed and achieved little.

At the crucial moments of the August Coup, arguably the last attempt by the Soviet hardlines to prevent the breakup of the state, some military units did enter Moscow to act against Boris Yeltsin but ultimately refused to crush the protesters surrounding the Russian parliament building.

As the Soviet system neared disintegration, the units stationed in Ukraine and some other breakaway republics swore loyalty to their new national governments while most of the Soviet military was redesignated as the Military of Russia in 1992. In the next few years these forces withdrew from Central and Eastern Europe, as well as from some newly independent post-Soviet republics. While in most places the withdrawal took place without any problems, the Russian army did remain in some disputed areas such as the Sevastopol naval base, Abkhazia and Transdnistria.

The loss of the recruits and industrial capacity in breakaway republics, as well as the breakdown of the Russian economy, caused a devastating decline in the capacity of post-Soviet Russian Armed forces in the decade after 1992.

The nuclear forces remained under control of the Russian military throughout, and in the early 1990s Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan agreed to surrender their nuclear stockpiles to Russia.

Timeline

Soviet military in foreign conflicts

In addition to explicit wars, the Soviet and US militaries took part in a number of internal conflicts in various countries as well as proxy wars between third countries as a means of advancing their strategic interests while avoiding direct conflict between the superpowers in the nuclear age (or in the case of the Spanish Civil War, avoiding a direct conflict with Nazi Germany at a time when neither side was prepared for such a war). In many cases, involvement was in the form of military advisors² as well as the sale or provision of weapons.

• 1936-1939 Soviet role in the Spanish Civil War
• 1945-49, 1950-53 China
• 1950-1953 Soviet role in Korean War
• 1961-1974 Soviet role in Vietnam War
• 1970s and 1980s Soviet military role in Africa, Middle East and Central America
• 1962-1964 Algiers
• 1962-63, 1967, 1968, 1969-72, 1973-74, 1974-75 Egypt
• 1962-63, 1969-76 Yemen
• 1967, 1970, 1972, 1973 Syria
• 1975-79 Angola
• 1967-69, 1975-79 Mozambique
• 1977-79 Ethiopia
• 1960-63, 1964-68, 1969-70 Laos
• 1982 Syria/Lebanon

Notes

¹ Anders Åslund, "How small is the Soviet National Income?" in Henry S. Rowen and Charles Wolf, Jr., eds., The Impoverished Superpower: Perestroika and the Soviet Military Burden (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1990), p. 49.
² Some information is taken from the appendix "States, Cities, Territories and Periods of Warfare with Participation of Citizens of the Russian Federation." of the Russian Military Pension Law of 2003.

References

• This article incorporates public domain text from the Library of Congress Country Studies. - Soviet Union (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/sutoc.html)
• Koenig, William and Schofield, Peter: Soviet Military Power. Hong Kong: Bison Books, 1983.
• Odom, William E.: The Collapse of the Soviet Military. New Haven & London:Yale University Press, 1998